Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for detecting an object based on a range image.
Related Art
Conventionally, various object detection apparatuses for a vehicle driving assistance system have been proposed for detecting objects around a vehicle carrying the system to perform collision avoidance control. For example, an object detection apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2014-96005 is configured to generate a range image based on a pair of grayscale images and group adjacent regions in the range image having range data representing close distances. However, a grouping region made by grouping adjacent regions may include different objects located at substantially the same distances from the vehicle carrying the apparatus. The object detection apparatus is configured to determine whether or not the grouping region can be divided based on vertical brightness differences on the range image. If the grouping region can be divided, the apparatus detects objects in sub-regions obtained by dividing the grouping region.
The object detection apparatus divides the grouping region using brightness information on the grayscale image, which may increase processing load. Thus, a vehicle-mounted apparatus with a limited memory capacity and a limited memory access speed needs an increased amount of time to detect objects, which may make it difficult to detect objects in real time. In addition, to reduce the processing load, the object detection apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2014-96005 detects objects in the grouping region of the range image, which may degrade the object detection performance.
In consideration of the foregoing, exemplary embodiments of the present invention are directed to providing techniques for detecting objects while both suppressing processing load and preventing object detection performance degradation in a compatible manner.